Newad has sold all of its digital properties and its online ad network to Montreal media company Oboxmedia. Newad’s owned and operated sites Dose.ca, Nightlife.ca, TPL, TPL Moms, Ton Barbier and 33Mag, will transition to Obox, strengthening its original content offering and broadening its reach in the Quebec market.
Newad’s owned and operated sites and the 100 long-tail publishers it represents (most of them Canadian) reach 4.5 million unique visitors each month. Citing ComScore numbers, Obox said its unduplicated audience would increase from 13.7 million to 15.3 million and would reach 65% of the Quebec population and 50% of all Canadians post acquisition.
Obox currently owns and operates several sites in the Quebec market, like celebrity news and entertainment site Hollywood PQ. Obox CEO and co-founder Erick Vadeboncoeur said adding Newad’s sites would help the company continue building up the in-house editorial capabilities it can offer brands.
“This acquisition is a perfect fit, because there’s both the network part that we can monetize, and the owned and operated part, which is an extension of what we’ve already started,” he said. “It’s important for us to control that creation of content, because when we do [branded content] programs with advertisers it’s important to have all the video and editorial talent in house.”
He said Nightlife has built a sizable audience in the hard-to-reach 18-34 french-speaking demo. Obox also plans to revamp Dose, and English-language site also targeted at the 18-34 crowd.
Newad’s 10 editorial and publishing sales staff will join Obox as part of the acquisition. Following the sale, Newad will narrow its focus on its out-of-home media, which was bolstered this summer with the acquisition of Zoom Media’s restobar, campus, fashion, business, media and golf networks. Newad now has 45,000 indoor digital and static boards across 5,000 locations, the largest such network in Canada.
“Our vision is simple: We want to offer advertisers the best indoor advertising solutions in Canada,” said Newad CEO Michael Reha in a release.
Obox currently respresents several major international publishers in Canada including Mashable, Twitch.tv, Rovio (makers of Angry Birds), and Penske Media (Variety, Deadline, Hollywood Life). It also represents a range of local French-language publications like foodie blog Trois fois par jour and BuzzFeed-style quiz and humour site Petit Petit Gamin.
Vadeboncoeur’s fellow co-founders, Christopher Rovny and Luis Rodrigues, created AskMen.com, a successful men’s lifestyle site they sold to IGN in 2005. The CEO said the team’s background has made them very focused on building an audience around local publishers that produce original content.
“Not only French content, but Canadian content in general has had a bit of a hit in the past couple of years, with everyone going to programmatic and CPMs and revenue dropping. We’ve seen a lot of local creators close shop across Canada,” Vadeboncoeur said. “We’re going the opposite way. We’ve proven our model since 2009 with branded content programs for advertisers. We feel we have the secret sauce to be able to monetize these amazing properties.”
As far as creating and amplifying branded content, the company has worked with brands like Telus, Sport Chek, Grey Goose, Simons and Mark’s. As a recent example, it developed sponsored rewards in Rovio’s Angry Birds 2 for Sony’s Hotel Transylvania, and a similar activation for Hasbro’s Kre-o on Roblox, a Minecraft-style mobile game.
Obox also has a partnership with GumGum for in-image banner advertising across its network, and has indexed over 1 billion images for contextual targeting. Also, it’s using expandable in-text video ads designed by Teads.
